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Walmart’s cavernous stores apparently aren’t large enough to hold the Hidden World in DreamWorks’ latest How to Train Your Dragon film. Instead, the retailer announced today that it will use its parking lots to host free five-minute VR dragon-riding experiences — and the expected significant lines of people — in an effort to spur merchandise sales at matching gift shops.

Developed by Walmart-backed Spatial& in partnership with DreamWorks, the endeavor looks more like a theme park installation than a traditional retail experience. Visitors as young as 8 years old are allowed to participate in the action, which starts with a character greeting at an onboarding tent before moving into a VR world powered by headsets and motion VR chairs. Since the goal of the free ride is to sell merchandise, guests are led directly to a themed gift shop right after they take off the VR gear.

A YouTube video of the experience shows fully computer-generated fantasy scenes that look as if they could be straight out of a modern video game, though kids and adults aren’t handed controllers or actually playing anything. Instead, they get to see 360-degree videos and high-resolution images with VR head tracking, all designed to elicit emotional responses.

Walmart and Spatial& specifically expect that people will want to buy items “featuring the characters they befriended and created deep connections with during the activation,” including toys, DVDs, and video games. The immersive virtual tour of the Hidden World includes How to Train Your Dragon characters such as Astrid, Hiccup, Hookfang, and Toothless, with greetings during onboarding by Ruffnut and Tuffnut.

“Collaborating with DreamWorks Animation and its iconic How to Train Your Dragon franchise is such an exciting way to bring Spatial&’s first ever activation to the public,” said Spatial& CEO Katie Finnegan. “Spatial& was founded based on the belief that VR will transform merchandising and retail and we can’t wait to finally share this uniquely immersive shopping experience with consumers across the country.”

Though the collaboration certainly isn’t the first to leverage VR to sell things, it’s a particularly interesting experiment in that correlations between the experience and purchases will be fairly easy to track, and the promise of free VR experiences based on a well-liked movie franchise could be enough to draw crowds. It’s also somewhat unique in that Walmart has chosen to site the project outside of its stores — in winter, no less — rather than utilizing space inside.

Walmart will start offering the experiences over several days at multiple stores in one city before moving on to another city. The seven-city run begins at noon February 15 in Los Angeles, California, and concludes in Bentonville, Arkansas on April 9.

Last year, Amazon used VR to create virtual selling spaces inside Indian shopping malls where it wasn’t operating physical stores. Similarly, retailers such as Macy’s have started to use VR inside their stores to let customers browse inventory that would otherwise be too broad or large to stock locally.

Multiplayer archery game QuiVr Vanguard is coming to Oculus Quest and multiplayer is possible with players on Oculus Go.

The game’s description on the Go store page says the title will be compatible with both headsets and allow cross-play once Quest releases.

QuiVr is one of the most popular archery VR games available. Over the course of two years its creators built a PC version with a role-playing game progression system. A smaller arcade version of the game called QuiVr Vangaurd was more recently released by the developers. A studio called Luminary Apps is taking on the mobile version, which is the version of the game getting cross-play cooperative multiplayer on Oculus Go and Quest.

Cooperative play between the two headsets may place QuiVr Vanguard on a short list of apps with that kind of multiplayer capability on standalone in 2019. The number of early Quest buyers who will already have Oculus Go sitting around their home could be significant. This means some Oculus Quest buyers will already have a second headset in their home to play a two-player game with a family member or friend.

We are expecting major updates from Facebook’s Oculus at the Game Developers Conference next month. Anticipation is high for the $400 Oculus Quest headset and its 6DoF Touch controllers and we are expecting at least 50 titles to be ready for Quest launch. Some VR developers are starting to hint they are seriously considering building Quest versions of their games but we still don’t have a full list of the games coming to the headset just yet.

The Doctor returns to virtual reality with an original interactive short film. With the twelfth season of Doctor Who scheduled to arrive in 2020, fans of the long-running BBC series have at the very least a 10-month void to fill before they’re blessed with more time-skipping adventures from the thirteenth Doctor and her Companions. To

Doctor Who fans will soon get to join an animated Doctor in a virtual reality TARDIS.

The new project confirmed by the BBC today is a 12 minute adventure including a performance by the latest Doctor Jodie Whittaker “in animated form.” Doctor Who: The Runaway “will be available on selected VR headsets in the coming months.”

Plot details are sparse for The Runaway. The official description for the project says you get a chance to “be the Doctor’s champion” as you face a “deadly threat.” So, a standard Doctor Who adventure.

Here’s our first look at the animated version:

Doctor Who: The Runaway is an animated VR adventure coming to VR headsets.

Doctor Who, for those unfamiliar, is one of England’s most famous and long-lasting television programs. For more than 50 years, “The Doctor” has visited earthlings on TV and taken them on adventures in the TARDIS. Whittaker recently became the 13th incarnation of the time-traveling character. Her ship — disguised as a blue police call box — is a perfect fit for VR given its larger-on-the-inside physics. Once inside, going through that doorway once more can take you anywhere and anytime. In many ways, the TARDIS is the perfect vehicle for a VR experience. So that makes the Doctor — a kind of intergalactic tour guide and friend — the perfect character to join you on such a journey.

The project is “produced by the BBC’s digital drama team, BBC VR Hub and Passion Animation Studios.” Doctor Who: The Runaway is written by Victoria Asare-Archer and directed by Mathias Chelebourg with music from composer Segun Akinola.

When I heard the name Apex Legends, I first thought how similar it was to Apex Construct. The new free-to-play battle royale game from Respawn is of course very different to Fast Travel’s VR adventure. Still, mix-ups were bound to happen. And indeed they have.

Fast Travel’s Andreas Juliusson recently revealed as much on Reddit. Since Apex Legends’ launch on February 4th Apex Construct has seen a 4000% increase in Steam page visitors. As Juliusson notes, you won’t even find Legends on Steam because it’s only available through EA Origin.

And then there are the sales. Apparently, Apex Construct sold more in China over the last week than it did throughout all of 2018. Of course, Apex Construct is not Apex Legends and a lot of people only realized this after buying it. Whoops. Juliusson noted that the team expects to see a lot of refunds in the next few weeks but “our books look pretty good at the moment”.

Apparently, a lot of recent negative Steam reviews are down to players feeling scammed. By a game that came out a year before Apex Legends. A game which clearly states it requires a VR headset. Also a game that is not a free-to-play hero shooter. You can’t make this up.

Of course, if you have a VR headset then you could do a lot worse than accidentally buying Apex Construct. It was one of our favorite VR games of the last year. As for Apex Legends, it’s unlikely to ever see VR support. Respawn is, however, working on a VR game of its own. It won’t be related to Titanfall, though.

Looking for more ways to kill people in Gorn? Really? The other 100 ways aren’t enough? Well, then you should give the new Death Pit a spin.

This new level is the highlight of this week’s Gorn update. In this more morbid arena, you can toss enemies into a pit of spikes for a quick way to finish them off. Lovely.

The other big addition here is an improved campaign. Developer Free Lives says its reworked progression and the unlock system to make it feel “a bit more complete”. Currently Gorn has you trying to execute certain types of kills to gain new weapons and getting a certain number of wins in the arena to unlock bosses. We’ll be interested to see how that’s changed. Expect more tweaks to the system in the future, though.

Free Lives also says that the game is now running “much better than before” thanks to some optimization. Other additions include a new sound spatializer engine, new voice lines for enemies and the emperor and “More narrative content than anyone could realistically have expected given the nature of the game.” We’re not exactly sure how you fit a story into a game about yammering knuckleheads, but the update image above does perhaps provide some hints.

Finally, there are improved seagulls. Yay! You can see the full list of tweak over here.

Elsewhere, Free Lives says its “pouring blood and sweat” into the game on the road to final launch. No word yet on when they launch will finally arrive but we’ll keep you posted. Gorn remains one of our favorite VR games for wanton destruction.

Romance is in the air, and on your phone. Valentine’s Day has once again arrived, bringing with it the inevitable stream of Hallmark cards, over-priced chocolate, and of course, hundreds upon thousands of roses. This year, however, Google is looking to modernize your romantic festivities with Love Playmoji characters and AR stickers for Pixel Playground,

UK Social enterprise pilots the use of immersive technology in social care. Over the past five years, the number of children who are looked after by Local Authorities (LAs) and children who require child protection plans to be kept safe from ‘significant harm’ has increased dramatically in England. And while demand for foster carers and